How do you structure your contents in WP?

[lmartins]

My typical use scenario for WordPress is the common business presentation website.
This usually comprehends:
- Home
- About Us
- Services
- Customers
- Contact

Which then will develop into new subsection or not depending on the client.
I've first started by replicating this structure with Pages, but im now getting the sense this is not the ideal approach, making a bit trickier to work with custom loops, plugins, etc, in order to have the clients manage featured contents and whatnot.

I would love to hear how do you approach this.

Any tips will be very welcome.

Thanks!

[Mealtog]

Can you explain a bit more as to why this typical group of pages is an issue? Are you thinking you want to use Posts instead for these?

[lmartins]

Hi @mealtog

I first got the sense Pages would become an issue since most widgets would only allow me do show one Page. Im referring to widgets for outputting content in the homepage.

Im trying of find a way to make it easy for the clients to manage their sites, publishing content and easily selecting content to be featured in the homepage or specialty areas. For the latter im thinking of using widget or custom loops, im inclined to widgets so that they still can move things around if necessary.

After my first post I kinda got inclined to the "prescribed" recommendation of only using posts for date sensitive information, such as news sections or blog posts.

Still, any expertise you might share would be welcome.

Cheers.

[Mealtog]

I see where you are going with this. In my experience, especially for brick and mortar businesses where pages are important to the business current and potential clientele, I have always used pages for the usual About Us, Contact Us, etc...

And yes, it does mean you won't be able to use widgets that can show 3 items let's say. But I find that for a brick and mortar, they normally show 3-6 "blocks" on their homepage and that means setting up 3-6 Page widgets. Once it's set, it's easy enough for any client to go in and swap out pages. At least after some training, I think most can do this.

The only time I would showcase more than 1 page in any widget is to use the responsive slider where I choose Pages and manually enter the Post ID.

Like you, I recommend to clients to use Posts for data sensitive info (in general) and Pages for non time sensitive info. But, there are some businesses that still manually update Pages that are highly used for announcements. Instead of having an announcement inside posts, some clients prefer to manage 1 page all year round and swap time sensitive content on this 1 page.

There is no right or wrong, but I would suggest doing what you are doing. Time sensitive content in posts and all others in pages.

[lmartins]

Thanks for your thoughtful response @Mealtog.
That was the kind of validation I was looking for and it seems im not in a horribly wrong track here.

Btw, I managed to have widgets outputting multiple pages and/or posts. I created a taxonomy dedicated to the featured positions assigned to both content types, and then the user can pick a position right in the post/page editor screen.

Cheers.

[Mealtog]

Hey great way to deal with this is to out put a tag. Was that what you did? Nice. I normally take Taxonomy = Category in WordPress.

[lmartins]

I went with taxonomies to have the "hierarchical" option so that the user can see them available positions as a checkbox list, instead of having to guess the tag names. Might have to investigate this a bit further.

[Mealtog]

Taxonomy is just your categories correct? How can this be tied into Pages? Sorry, may not be following completely.

[lmartins]

Not really. I've created a custom Taxonomy named "Featured" and assigned it to Posts and Pages. Because i've created with the "hierarchical" flag turned on, it shows an interface similar to categories media box, where the user can pick from existent options.

[Author]

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